The Conservatives are losing the fiscal high ground

Every country was blindsided by the pandemic; few governments responded to it by borrowing as much as Britain. The figures that Rishi Sunak laid out in his spending review this week boggle the mind. He has been Chancellor barely ten months, yet has already borrowed more than Gordon Brown did in ten years. The upshot of his Commons statement this week is that Sunak will carry on spending money as fast as the Bank of England can print it. But as he knows, debt bubbles have a habit of bursting. The response to this crisis may sow the seeds of the next one.

It’s a point which Sunak has a hard time making in Downing Street, let alone with his party. The Prime Minister likes to use the language of low taxes, economic dynamism and fast recoveries. But set against that is his instinct to answer every problem by spending. He has a worrying habit of indulging in comfort purchases: the HS2 line at £80 billion, or paying £500 million for a new 5G satellite network that even the private sector could not make financially viable.